The appearance in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, came a day after Stone was indicted on seven criminal counts as part of Mueller’s ongoing investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Before dawn Friday, Stone was arrested by a cadre of FBI agents at his Florida home. He was reportedly then taken to the Broward County courthouse for an 11 a.m. hearing before Judge Lurana Snow.

Watch exclusive CNN footage of the FBI arresting longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. https://cnn.it/2FZxnjd

Stone was charged with five counts of making false statements, one count of obstructing another probe of Russian interference conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, and one count of witness tampering.

The 24-page indictment alleges that Stone had contacted, and had been contacted by, an array of Trump campaign associates about leaking Democratic officials’ stolen information on the eve of the 2016 election to sway the contest against Hillary Clinton.

The organization that coordinated the document-dumping campaign is unnamed in the indictment but clearly refers to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. That whistleblowing site dumped tranches of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign John Podesta that were allegedly hacked by Russian operatives.

Stone has repeatedly denied colluding with Russia. His lawyer, Grant Smith, told NBC News on Friday that if the special counsel had “found any collusion, they would have charged him with it.”

Manafort’s hearing relates to Mueller’s allegation that the Republican operative repeatedly lied in breach of his plea deal with the special counsel. Manafort had pleaded guilty to multiple crimes related to his work for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine.

“This has nothing to do with the president,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of Stone’s indictment Friday morning. “The president did nothing wrong. There was no collusion on his part.”

Days before bombshell reports that an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether President Trump has acted as a Russian asset, Bernstein told a CNN panel that he believed one of the questions special counsel Robert Mueller was trying to answer was whether any obstruction by the president furthered the interests of the Russians.

Now the reporter of Watergate fame is indicating that he knows where the Mueller investigation is going to end up, and it’s not looking good for Trump.

“You teed up the point that the Washington Post and Times are now making,” CNN’s media reporter Brian Stelter told Bernstein on Sunday’s episode of “Reliable Sources” before airing a clip from Wednesday.

“Bingo. You said the obstruction is not separate from the collusion question,” Stelter said after. “These investigations are linked. That’s exactly what these newspapers are signaling this weekend.”

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey in the spring of 2017. The counterintelligence inquiry was wrapped into the FBI’s broader Russia investigation, which Mueller was appointed to lead after Comey’s ouster. In a follow-up, the Washington Post reported the president took steps to try to protect his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including pressuring a translator to withhold information on discussions between the two leaders from administration officials.

Bernstein was asked how he knew ahead of time.

“First of all, the New York Times and the Washington Post were more advanced on this story than I was,” he began. “But I did know something.”

He said Trump’s “lies” are all about Russia and suggested lawyers working with the White House told him they believe he hasn’t told the truth on a number of matters related to Russia.

“Part of what I know comes from lawyers of some of the other defendants in this matter who have appeared before Mueller, including members of the joint defense team which collaborates with the White House, and those lawyers believe the president has been lying at every turn about his relationship with Russia,” Bernstein said. “Look, let us look at all of the lies, follow the money, follow the lies. They are all mostly and most vehemently about Russia. Whether we are talking about [Michael] Flynn, Trump, his son, [Jared] Kushner, back to lying about questions having to do with Russia, about what happened at the Trump Tower meeting. The president of the United States drafts a totally false statement about what happened at that meeting that his son was at.”

Bernstein also said he has been told that the draft of Mueller’s final report shows Trump helped Putin “destabilize” the U.S.

“Look, Trump keeps going back to the idea we need better relations with Russia. Could be. He could well be right,” Bernstein said. “But from a point of view of strength and what everybody can see is that he has not acted with Russia from the United States having a strength advantage with Russia. Rather, he has done what appears to be Putin’s goals. He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election, no matter whether it was purposeful or not, and that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report, I’m told, is to be about.”

Trump’s top spokeswoman, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, called the Times report “absurd.” Asked about whether he has ever worked for the Russians during an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro late Saturday, Trump said it was ” the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked.”

Bernstein, best known for his investigative reporting that shed light on the Watergate scandal leading to former President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, suggested that not even Nixon lied as much as Trump does. “Nixon lied to further the cover-up — he was a criminal president, but throughout his presidency Nixon did not lie about virtually everything of importance. … We have a president of the United States who lies.”

The Office of the Special Counsel deleted text messages from the iPhone of fired FBI agent Peter Strzok before turning it over to the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), according to a report released by the federal watchdog.

On Thursday, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report stating thousands of text messages exchanged between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page could not be recovered after Mueller’s team wiped clean the phones it had issued them.

So Mueller’s team wiped ALL of the data off of Peter Strzok’s iPhone after determining “it contained no substantive text messages.” Given what we know about Strzok, this smells like quite the coverup. Time for Congress to step in?

“SCO’s Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages,” the watchdog report reads. As Conservative Review national security reporter Jordan Schachtel first discovered, the OIG said Strzok’s cell phone was “reset to factory settings,” deleting all data stored on the device.

The federal watchdog said in the report it found “no discernible patterns” about the content of thousands of messages the FBI was able to recover between Strzok and Page. Both have been part of Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Strzok and Page testified before Congress this summer, and the former FBI agent admitted that he had not turned over all of his communications with Page to the Inspector General from his personal phone, even though their recovered conversations showed the two suggesting they move to apps like iMessage or Gmail. Strzok told outgoing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that it is a “safe assumption” that he sent messages to Page from his personal phone that were similar in nature to the widely-publicized messages attacking Trump supporters. He told House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that he himself determined which messages on that phone were “relevant to FBI business” that the Inspector General could review.

At that time of their exchanges, the FBI was investigating whether former secretary of state and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton improperly used a private email account while she was Secretary of State. Strzok, a senior counterintelligence agent, was assigned to the case, as was Page. Reports claimed the two were romantically involved during this time. Strzok was ultimately fired after anti-Trump text messages between him and Page were discovered by the special counsel.

Thursday’s report said the FBI used special software to collect more than 20,000 text messages from the pair’s phones, but not all were sent between Strzok and Page. Investigators have already released some of the controversial texts, including a message from Strzok saying he would “stop” President Donald Trump from winning the election.

Missing text messages from the pair’s iPhones, though, continue to elude the FBI.

Early this year, the Office of the Inspector General contacted Verizon Wireless to determine if the carrier retains old text messages. Verizon said messages are retained for up to seven days after they are sent, and then erased. The missing messages in question were much older than a week by that time and Verizon no longer had them.

Former FBI Director James Comey revealed in closed-door testimony with House Republicans on Friday that he deliberately concealed an explosive memorandum about his one-on-one Oval Office meeting with President Trump in February 2017 from top Department of Justice officials.

The former FBI head also acknowledged that when the agency initiated its counterintelligence probe into possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government in July 2016, investigators “didn’t know whether we had anything” and that “in fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”

His remarks square with testimony this summer from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose anti-Trump texts became a focus of House GOP oversight efforts. Page told Congress in a closed-door deposition that “even as far as May 2017” — more than nine months after the counterintelligence probe commenced — “we still couldn’t answer the question” as to whether Trump staff had improperly colluded with Russia.

Comey further testified on Friday that he and his aides were “all very concerned” about how the president had spoken of the probe into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a private Oval Office meeting, according to a 235-page transcript of his remarks released as a part of an agreement between House Republicans and Comey.

The fired FBI director wrote in his memorandum that Trump had told him, “I hope you can let this go,” amid reports that Flynn had lied to the FBI and senior White House officials about his contacts with Russia’s government.

But despite that concern, Comey told Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that he and his team made a “judgment call” not to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his lieutenants about Trump’s comments, saying he thought Sessions would recuse himself “in a matter of days” from the Russia probe.

“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close, not brief the investigative team at this point and not go over and talk to the leadership of the Department of Justice, to hold onto it until we got a new deputy attorney general and they sorted out how they were going to supervise the Russia investigation,” Comey said.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, at center, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (AP)

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was later fired for leaking a self-serving story to the press and lying about it to Comey and federal investigators, was among the brain trust Comey sat down with to discuss his options. The two were joined, Comey said, by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki.

Comey told lawmakers that others may have been present as well, including FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich (who was an associate deputy director at the time), National Security Branch Executive Director Carl Ghattas, and FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who recently announced he would leave the agency by year-end. Comey said that he did not believe anti-Trump FBI Agent Peter Strzok or former FBI lawyer Lisa Page were in the room.

Comey testified: “We believed that the Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, was on the cusp of recusing himself from anything related to Russia, so it didn’t make any sense to brief him on it, and that there was no deputy attorney general at that point.” (Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, was terminated by Trump in late January 2017 after she refused to defend the administration’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority nations in court.)

“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close.”

— Former FBI Director James Comey

Sessions recused himself from Russia-related matters shortly afterward, in early March 2017 — a decision that Trump has since called a “terrible mistake,” although it was recommended by career Justice Department officials in part because Sessions had met with Russian dignitaries while assisting with the Trump campaign. But Jordan pressed Comey on why he decided not to tell the next-in-command at the DOJ.

Lawmakers release transcript of testimony from former FBI Director James Comey; reaction from Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican member of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees.

“I don’t know who was No. 3 at that point,” Comey responded. “There was an acting — there was a U.S. Attorney acting as the deputy attorney general, who we knew would be in the seat only until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed,” he added, in an apparent reference to former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, who served until Rosenstein took the job in April 2017.

Comey continued that “it made sense to hold onto it” because “we saw no investigative urgency.”

But unredacted sections of Comey’s other memoranda documenting his conversations with Trump apparently demonstrate that he later did inform Boente and other top DOJ officials about other sensitive matters concerning his conversations with the president.

In a memorandum documenting his phone conversation with Trump on March 30, 2017, about how to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation from the White House, Comey wrote, “I called the acting attorney general and relayed the substance of the above and said I was telling him so he could decide what guidance to give me, if any.”

In a call from the White House that day, Comey wrote that Trump had asked him “several times” to “find a way to get out” to the public that he was not actively under investigation as part of the ongoing federal probe into possible Russia collusion with his team. Comey assured Trump, and congressional leaders, that the president was not being investigated at the time.

Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, right, speaks to reporters after a day of testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Dec. 7, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Associated Press)

House Republicans are set to have another opportunity to question Comey before they lose majority status when the new Congress is seated in January. The fired FBI director told reporters his return visit for more testimony will likely come the “week after next.”

Comey largely frustrated GOP lawmakers during Friday’s session, in large part because his lawyers urged him not to answer numerous questions. On Twitter after his testimony, Comey sharply criticized what he characterized as Republicans’ “desperate attempt to find anything that can be used to attack the institutions of justice investigating this president.”

But while Comey insisted in the interview that “we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes,” the transcript shows he claimed ignorance or memory lapses in response to questions concerning key details and events in the Russia investigation, which some GOP lawmakers continue to claim was improperly conducted.

The transcript reveals lawmakers’ frustration with his lack of specifics. Asked if he recalled who drafted the FBI’s “initiation document” for the July 2016 Russia investigation, Comey said, “I do not.” He again claimed not to know when asked about the involvement in that initiation of Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump texts later got him removed from the special counsel’s probe.

When asked if the FBI had any evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired to hack the DNC server, Comey gave a lengthy answer referring to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as to why he couldn’t answer.

Early Sunday, Trump slammed Comey’s testimony repeatedly on Twitter, deriding him as “Leakin’ James Comey.”

On 245occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) – didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!

Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!

But there was a time when Comey, by his own accounting, didn’t think of himself as the kind of person who would leak information behind the president’s back.

In a Jan. 28, 2017, dinner with Trump in the White House’s Green Room, Comey wrote in a since-released memorandum that he told the president, “I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.“

James Comey Admits FBI Was Still Probing ‘Pee’ Dossier Until Day He Was Fired

At the time James B. Comey was fired as FBI director, his agency was still attempting to corroborate claims made in the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier, Comey admitted.

In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Friday, Comey described an effort “to try to replicate, either rule in or rule out, as much of that collection of reports that’s commonly now called the Steele dossier as possible, and that that work was ongoing when I was fired.” Trump dismissed Comey from the FBI on May 9, 2017.

A transcript of Comey’s testimony was released on Saturday. During one exchange with lawmakers, Comey said that FBI efforts to probe the dossier given to the agency by former British spy Christopher Steele started “sometime in ’16” almost immediately after Steele provided the charges.

The timing is instructive. In previous testimony, Comey admitted that he pushed back against a January 2017 request from President Donald Trump to possibly investigate the origins of the claims made inside the Steele dossier.

Comey’s latest testimony shows that even while he was cautioning Trump against ordering a probe of the dossier claims, Comey’s own FBI was quietly conducting an ongoing investigation into the wild content of that very dossier.

During prepared remarks for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, delivered on June 8, 2017, Comey related how he pushed back against a suggestion from Trump to investigate the dossier claims.

The former FBI chief stated that following a January 6 Oval Office meeting with Intelligence Community leaders, Comey “remained alone with the President Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.”’

It is clear Comey was referring to the dossier since he writes the “salacious and unverified” material was about to be publicly reported by the news media. Four days after that briefing, the dossier was published by BuzzFeed.

In his statement summarizing his conversation with Trump, Comey refers to Russian prostitutes, a key component of the dossier:

He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia.

In a private White House dinner with Trump on January 27, Comey says the topic of the “salacious material” again came up and he reveals that Trump was considering asking the FBI to investigate the origins of the claims. Comey pushed back against that idea.

Comey writes:

During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.

The Steele dossier was reportedly funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.

A House Intelligence Committee memo released last February documented that as FBI director, Comey signed three FISA applications to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page with the dossier serving as part of the basis for the warrant requests.

Comey signed the applications without telling the FISA court that the dossier was financed by Trump’s primary political opponents, the memo related.

“Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials,” the memo states.

The GOP memo also relates that after Steele was terminated months earlier as an FBI source a “source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated.” Still, Comey saw fit, according to the Republican and Democrat memos, to utilize the dossier in the FISA documents. He also briefed Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier contents.

When he was appointed a Justice Department special counsel in May 2017, Robert Mueller was assigned the task of determining whether presidential candidate Donald Trump and/or members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to elect Trump president. New court filings Friday by Mueller and federal prosecutors in New York City leave this central question unanswered.

In 19 months, the Mueller probe has expanded again and again, taking an ever-widening look over many years at a broad range of activities by people associated with the Trump campaign or who had business dealings with Trump long before he moved into the White House.

Some crimes that people have been charged with or even admitted to have nothing to do with Trump, but rather pertain to wrongdoing or alleged wrongdoing by people with some association with him.

Unquestionably, this is a fishing expedition that has caught some fish. Mueller and his team of prosecutors have secured indictments, convictions and guilty pleas from people with some affiliation with Trump – but as yet, there is no “smoking gun” saying there was Trump-Russia collusion to defeat Hillary Clinton and install Trump in the Oval Office.

Will this evidence turn up in the future? The only honest answer those of us without inside information can give is that we don’t know.

Much of Mueller’s activities are cloaked in secrecy. Many of the documents he has filed in court have large amounts of information blacked out – “redacted” in legal terminology – so we have no idea what they say.

But we have to wonder: How long will this investigation go on? How wide a net will it cast? How far back in time will it go? How many more millions of dollars will it cost American taxpayers?

And finally, is the cloud the Mueller probe is casting over the Trump administration benefitting our nation, or simply weakening the president and preventing him from accomplishing the many things the American people elected him to do on our behalf?

The latest chapter in this long saga took place Friday when a sentencing memorandum was filed in U.S. District Court New York City by the Justice Department dealing with former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Cohen earlier pleaded guilty to multiple counts of business and tax fraud. He also pleaded guilty to making an excessive contribution to the Trump campaign and to making false statements to Congress regarding unsuccessful efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The sentencing memo for Cohen shows there is clearly no love lost between him and the Justice Department, despite his pleading guilty to the charges against him.

The Cohen memo was in sharp contrast to the sentencing recommendation that Mueller recently filed in the government’s case against retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served for 24 days as President Trump’s national security adviser. That recommended little or no jail time.

But the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York asked the court to impose a “substantial term of imprisonment” against Cohen of about four to five years.

The Probation Department is recommending a sentence of 42 months in prison and a $100,000 fine for Cohen.

The sentencing memorandum castigates Cohen, saying he was “motivated by personal greed, and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends.”

The four crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to – tax evasion, false statements to a financial institution, illegal campaign contributions, and false statements to Congress – were “marked by a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life (and was evidently hidden from the friends and family members who wrote on his behalf).”

In fact, Cohen’s criminal conduct, according to the sentencing memo, strikes “at several pillars of our society and system of government: the payment of taxes; transparent and fair elections; and truthfulness before government and in business.”

And finally, is the cloud the Mueller probe is casting over the Trump administration benefitting our nation, or simply weakening the president and preventing him from accomplishing the many things the American people elected him to do on our behalf?

The Justice Department accuses Cohen of seeking the “extraordinary leniency” of no prison sentence based on “his rose-colored view of the seriousness of the crimes” and his providing “certain information to law enforcement.”

But the department downplays Cohen’s cooperation with Special Counsel Mueller, calling Cohen’s claim “overstated” and “incomplete.”

In fact, the department says Cohen is not getting official recognition as a “cooperating witness.” The sentencing memo says Cohen’s providing of some information should be a “mitigating factor” but that he “repeatedly declined to provide full information about the scope of any additional criminal conduct in which he may have engaged or had knowledge.”

This throws doubt on the idea that Cohen has secretly provided some kind of undisclosed information or evidence to the special counsel that bears on what is supposed to be the focus of Mueller’s investigation: whether there was any unlawful collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials to change the outcome of the 2016 election.

Another interesting note in the sentencing recommendation is a statement by the Justice Department that indicates that Cohen greatly exaggerated his access to Trump. The department says that Cohen “secured a substantial amount of consulting business for himself” by claiming he had “unique insights and access to Individual-1,” referring to Trump.

But while Cohen made millions of dollars from these consulting contracts, “his promises of insight and access proved essentially hollow” and he performed “minimal work,” according to the sentencing memo. It also says Cohen “used sophisticated tactics to conceal his misconduct.”

After a lengthy description of Cohen’s crimes, the Justice Department says that his conduct “underscores the need for a substantial period of incarceration as a means to promote respect for the law and to deter future abuses by other individuals seeking improperly to influence the electoral process, evade taxes, or lie to financial institutions.”

The department then spends eight pages explaining why the court should ignore Cohen’s request for a sentence of time served, with no additional jail time, because in essence, Cohen thinks “he is above the laws reflected in his crimes of conviction.”

Yet it cannot be emphasized enough that once again, as with prior documents filed by the Justice Department and the special counsel dealing with other defendants, there is no information in Cohen’s sentencing memorandum about the issue of possible Trump-Russia election collusion.

Perhaps there is such material in whatever information Cohen gave to the special counsel in his debriefing meetings. We can only guess.

There were also new developments Friday in a separate case involving former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort.

Mueller filed a document in U.S. District court in Washington outlining his claim that Manafort breached a plea agreement when he “told multiple discernible lies” to Mueller’s office and the FBI that were “not instances of mere memory lapses.”

Mueller says that Manafort met with the special counsel’s office 12 times and was called before a grand jury twice.

Large portions of the filing are redacted, but Mueller contends that Manafort lied about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian political consultant who worked with Manafort.

Mueller also contends that Manafort lied about: a wire transfer of $125,000 to a firm working for Manafort; information “pertinent to another Department of Justice investigation;” and “Manafort’s contact with Administration officials.”

Manafort contends he has told the truth to Mueller.

Once again, with the extensive redactions, there is no way to tell whether any of these alleged false statements had anything to do with the Russian election collusion investigation. If Manafort contests the government’s claims, as is likely, then the judge will hold a hearing where the special counsel says it will “prove the false statements.”

If the judges in each of these cases adopt the government’s recommendations and claims, Cohen will be facing a handful of years in prison and Manafort, 69, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Manafort was convicted in August of eight counts of financial fraud and was facing another trial on additional felony charges when he agreed in September to plead guilty to two more felonies and to cooperate with Mueller’s office.

What comes next? We simply don’t know, because Mueller has not lifted the curtain hiding much of his activities. But as of now, from what we know on the public record, Mueller has failed to prove the Trump-Russia collusion that he was appointed to investigate 19 months ago.

EXCLUSIVE: RELEASED TEXT MESSAGES AND EMAILS SHOW MUELLER TEAM’S COZY RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESS

Released messages document how Mueller’s spokesman took dozens of meetings with reporters over three months in 2017.

Reporters from nearly every major media outlet have been jockeying for influence and favoritism within the special counsel’s office.

One awkward exchange illustrates a reporter from CNN trashing an article written by White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

Hundreds of pages of emails and text messages released from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) special counsel’s office through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show an ongoing relationship between Robert Mueller’s team and the press, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Please don’t forget that the corrupt Peter Strzok was on his team also.

The documents, released in September, span months of communication and include messages from reporters ranging from a variety of outlets, including TheDCNF, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed.

While the vast majority of correspondences between Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr and a variety of journalists ends with a “no comment,” the messages expose Mueller’s team was willing to meet with a number of reporters in private meetings and over the phone.

Coordinating such meetings cuts against the narrative that the special counsel has been hesitant to give information to the press, instead opting to give information only through public announcements and statements.

No matter if snopes lies about these SOB’s, they are friends and criminals in bed together. (Click The Picture)

The New York Times ran a story in August poking fun at the secrecy of the special counsel, with one reporter writing that Carr’s “‘no comment’ replies have become a running dark joke among the Washington press corps.”

But on July 21st, 2017, Adam Goldman from TheNYT sent an email to Carr about arranging a “touch base” meeting, according to documents provided by the DOJ.

That meeting was later rescheduled, but it is just one in a pattern of meetings and private calls from reporters jockeying for opportunities to solicit information from an investigation that has been labeled as “leak proof” from the press.

Ironically, Vox was one of those exact outlets that proclaimed Mueller’s team as immune to leaks — despite one of its reporters communicating extensively with Carr via text.

During one interaction, Alex Ward asks Carr off the record if the investigation would continue should President Donald Trump fire Mueller.

“As guidance only, the [Deputy Attorney General] testified last week that he, not the President, would be the one to make the decision. 28 CFR 600 outlines under what circumstances a Special Counsel can be removed. If it came to that, a replacement would likely be found,” Carr answers.

A day later, Carr aids Ward in describing the room in which the investigation takes place. Despite Carr’s assistance, he is never mentioned in Ward’s piece published over a month later.

From late July until the end of September 2017, Carr held at least dozens of meetings with various reporters. Those meetings have rarely been discussed with the public, by both the government or the press, until the release of these documents.

TheDCNF could not find any evidence of impropriety by Mueller’s office, nor any evidence that Carr favored specific outlets.

Regardless, the messages document hours of conversations and meetings between a spokesman involved in a politicized investigation and reporters eager to cover for him in hopes of further access.

Other messages released by the DOJ illustrate more awkward interactions, showing how some reporters will even undermine colleagues in order to build trust in their relationship with the special counsel’s office.

CNN’s Evan Perez, who had extensive conversations with Carr from at least May through August 2017, expressed frustration at a story co-authored by the network’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

“I had nothing to do with it. Didn’t see it until after it was published. I would not have published that. But I’m also in a poor position to stop things,” Perez said of Acosta’s reporting.

Perez then communicates concern that the story could damage the validity of the special counsel’s investigation because of the attorney general’s politics.

“By the way, this story and the pick up its [sic] getting makes it so the public will think Mueller is in bed with (one of) the most partisan left-leaning AG in the nation. I’m sure he has good people working there but the leadership has a pretty partisan agenda,” Perez says to Carr.

“Maybe that’s what the Special Counsel wants,” he adds.

A month later, Perez ran a follow-up story on the Mueller investigation, prompting Carr to offer a phone call in case he needed any additional information or clarifications.